"Right now, the Asian tech industries excel at not innovation but copying and improving upon existing designs which typically originate elsewhere. This is not just a Chinese thing -- look at the Japanese auto industry or Korean flat panel fabs, for example."
This is a horrible generalization, and ludicrous if you work in the sciences.
Almost all of science is about copying and improving. There are very few "great leaps forward" in history compared to the little improvements. The history of technology is the history of millions upon millions of tiny little innovations and improvments.
You can keep that stereotype if it makes you feel warm and fuzzy, but the bottom line is that humans are humans, and the asian auto-companies defeated the american companies on pretty much all fronts.
I live in Montgomery County, and I have for a large part of my life. I can tell that none of you get it. You seem to think that government sees an issue, debates courses of action, and settles on one that seems best suited to handle the situation.
How naive.
The way things work here is solely based on money. Developers and other contractors are competing at the county fund trough, and the local government works with them in some inscrutable manner that bears little resemblence to what you think of as government. For example, take a look at clarksburg: http://www.neighborspac.org/Knapp-blames-duncan.ht m (random quick link from google, find your own, it's fun!). As another example, you could look at the develpment of the King farm near shady grove metro - they added 3200 new units, and expected the already crowded roads neighboring the area to handle the traffic. They added nothing to help. No. of units added and sold is great for developers and for taxes. Building roads is boring.
So do I believe that paper is better than machines? You bet. I'm a technical person and I know it's absurd to use machines in place of paper for voting. But I'm thinking about the best way to process votes, and that's really the furthest thing from the minds of the county government.
It's been this way for the 20 years that I've lived here. I don't see it ending anytime soon.
I think you are taking the wrong perspective on this. The question is why don't the companies look into the reasons players skip the content to get to the end-game?
I think part of it is the same reason I eat an entire cheescake even knowing it will make me sick.:-)
However, part of it is that levelling is still boring. It's fun for awhile, but at a certain point it gets old.
I'm waiting for the day that you can level up in "battlegrounds" (keeping that vauge) until you reach high-level. All advancement done through constant competition, team or solo. That sounds fun.:-)
Please at least read about the game before you make stupid statements.
1) "No consequences" - Very loosely speaking, Eve is divided into a core area and a frontier. The core area is very heavily policed, and PK'ing results in permanent reputation loss (low enough rep = KOS by the police), and a police response. On the frontier everything goes, but the kill is logged with your character and there is a bounty system.
2) "Eventually one of the stronger players will find you at just the right moment and wipe you out." They only "wipe you out" if you don't tank advantage of cloning and insurance, and if you are flying with all your assets. This does happen to people, but they learn - keep your character clone up to date, insure your ship if you care about it, and don't fly a ship in dangerous areas if you can't afford to lose it.
If you travel the fringes of core space you will actually see a lot of frigates, crusisers, and battlecruisers. It's not all Battleships gate-camping, because those things are expensive and used for important purposes.
Finally, let me point out that the game is heavily waited towards corporate play. There is plenty of room for solo play, but the game between corporations is what makes eve truly wonderful. At that level of play, there are consequences all over the place.
-jeff
P.S. Ok, one more: this is not a game for the person who can't take losing. If you're getting into dangerous territories then you are going to lose ships, you're going to get podded, you'll lose that valuable cargo, and so on. Some people have no problem with that, others complain, but that's a style choice, not an absolute judgement and everyone should remember that.
"SG-1 is probably at its best when the cast & crew isn't taking itself too seriously."
I strongly disagree. While the humor is great, the best episodes were in the first few seasons where everything was deadly serious, the cast was clearly out-classed but not impossibly so, and the supposed "gods" were beaten because guns kill, humans are plucky and smart, and the "gods" were arrogant.
*spoiler below*
I think people forget the really good episodes, like the one where the go'auld put a bomb in a little girl to try to destroy the gate, and the conflict was the internal one of a bunch of people deciding to put the girl in a bomb-test-shelter-whatever so the gate wouldn't be destroyed. Or the antarctica episode, where we Sam had to face up to the fact that she couldn't solve everything. I still get chills when I see Daniel Jackson finally put everything together - they brought out his genius so well in that episode.
Wow has 3 newbie zones per side - it should only have one. The newbies should be focussed into a few zones at first using instances to handle overload. The number of available zones should then branch out as you level.
"We're not talking about what people enjoy. If somebody's still enjoying the game, they probably don't have a problem. It's when they have to play it, when they experience extreme discomfort when they aren't playing, when they turn their backs on everything else in life to play it"
So, some people can play the game for 40 hours a week and no be addicted, while others can?
I'll be honest, I think this "addiction" is hogwash. When I go on vacation, it takes me a day or two to "unwind" from work so I can really relax and enjoy. Does that make me "addicted" to work?
I think you people have simply mapped the brain chemistry associated with a long-term behavioral pattern and labeled it "addiction", which does a disservice to the real addicts who can't physically stop what they are doing without intervention.
So, what outfit did you wear to your raids? When you put on a few pounds, were you bit nervous about certain events because you would have to buy new clothes to make sure those pounds didn't show?
What if you said something stupid, or had some kind of falling out? In WoW, you could always join a new server. A bit harder to do that in real life.
What if you have only 2 hours? If you want to go out, the back and forth will take that much time.
Heck, what if you are tired, and want to socialize but don't want to leave the house? In the old days we used this strange device called a telephone, but it had lots of problems (like connecting to one person at a time)....and so on.
I think that part of the appeal of these games is that a person can socialize w/o many of the usual issues with socializing in real life. It's also vastly easier to turn on a game then to meet up with people in real life, and vastly easier to organize schedules. In the game, you are jumping continents, but in real life the only organization you need to do is to be in front of the computer at the correct time, for the correct time.
Unless I'm missing something, virtualization still is not sufficient for running a decent game, due to DX9. So if your big reason for keeping windows is MS Office or Outlook, then virtualization sounds wonderfull to me. But if you're a gamer looking to consolidate to one machine, you still need to dual-boot as far as I can see.
For me a wireless mouse would be usefull when I use my laptop in an easy chair, or in bed, or basically somewhere that's not setup neatly like a desk. The wires get in the way of moving around, and sometimes I have to position the mouse a bit farther away than usual.
It's a minor convience, but if I could find a good bluetooth mouse I would use it (the one I bought had a very jerky motion with major lag between moving my hand and the pointer moving).
What he's measuring is very real, questions of accuracy aside. As a business, my first data point is money. Forum comments, "what everyone says", etc, are pretty meaningless in comparison.
So grats to Sir Bruce for focussing on what makes the world go round.
"When deputies told Smith to knock it off, he came back and is now charged with theft of services."
The police warned him off first. Ignore the whole wireless angle - if someone is stalking my store for 3 months and the police tell him to stop, then he does it again, of course you call the police!
I think 911 is overboard, though, but this guy was warned.
"Let me remind you what table-top role-playing used to mean, at least with a good group and GM. It used to mean just that: playing a role, as in a theatre play. The whole point was taking part in an interactive fiction exercise, sorta like being co-autor in a theatre play."
No, that's not what table-top used to mean. Table-top role-playing grew out of miniature gaming, with people looking for more details for their miniatures. For example:
If you look at early RPGs - D&D, Tunnels & Trolls, etc, you'll see they're all about loot and levelling.
As time went on, people started getting more and more into the storytelling aspect, and more rulesets came out that were less tactical, or had details but added on substantial amounts of character details (see http://www.greenknight.com/products/rpg/index.shtm l for a particularly good example)
But let's not kid ourselves. These games started as wargames moving towards story-telling, not vice-versa.
I absolutely would fire the people involved for taking what should have been a slam-dunk title and turning it into a travesty. They played around with their ideas too much, and didn't attend to the business of making a solid game.
Note that none of this means the game should be made "my way". With a title like that, they should have made an rpg with mass appeal.
...you see this has nothing to do with WINE. The man used his keyboard to skill-up his weapon skills while he watched a movie on another screen. By his own admission, his character was mostly unattended. This is against the rules.
Note, I'm not judging the person or the rules, just pointing out that what he did was clearly against the rules.
There are many ways to interact in an MMORPG, combat is just one. I had a friend in Asheron's Call who was quite self-sufficient and tended to gather his own cart goods (dye plants, etc), but he also knew tons of people on the server because he spent a good deal of his time trading. He was extroverted in the real sense of the word, even if he didn't group.
Also, just because your pixels happen to be onscreen with other people's pixels doesn't make the activity extroverted. I've been in many groups were I interacted more with my guild then the people around me.
Bottom line is that to judge introverted/extroverted, you need to watch the player, not the character.
Of course you should find a game that suits your style. But the parent said the tired, old "soloers shouldn't play mmorpgs", which is just silly. There are many forms of interaction, and group combat is only one of them (and not even that interactive, in many cases).
Just to be clear - the DDO devs have every right to make a game that requires grouping, and I have every right not to play, and neither of those are evil. I'll find games, hopefully they'll find players (I mean that, I wish them the best), but our interests won't intersect.
However, if you tell me that all online rpgs must require grouping at all time, then forget it. That's silly.
Slashdot Mirror
"Right now, the Asian tech industries excel at not innovation but copying and improving upon existing designs which typically originate elsewhere. This is not just a Chinese thing -- look at the Japanese auto industry or Korean flat panel fabs, for example."
This is a horrible generalization, and ludicrous if you work in the sciences.
Almost all of science is about copying and improving. There are very few "great leaps forward" in history compared to the little improvements. The history of technology is the history of millions upon millions of tiny little innovations and improvments.
You can keep that stereotype if it makes you feel warm and fuzzy, but the bottom line is that humans are humans, and the asian auto-companies defeated the american companies on pretty much all fronts.
-Jeff
I live in Montgomery County, and I have for a large part of my life. I can tell that none of you get it. You seem to think that government sees an issue, debates courses of action, and settles on one that seems best suited to handle the situation.
t m (random quick link from google, find your own, it's fun!). As another example, you could look at the develpment of the King farm near shady grove metro - they added 3200 new units, and expected the already crowded roads neighboring the area to handle the traffic. They added nothing to help. No. of units added and sold is great for developers and for taxes. Building roads is boring.
How naive.
The way things work here is solely based on money. Developers and other contractors are competing at the county fund trough, and the local government works with them in some inscrutable manner that bears little resemblence to what you think of as government. For example, take a look at clarksburg: http://www.neighborspac.org/Knapp-blames-duncan.h
So do I believe that paper is better than machines? You bet. I'm a technical person and I know it's absurd to use machines in place of paper for voting. But I'm thinking about the best way to process votes, and that's really the furthest thing from the minds of the county government.
It's been this way for the 20 years that I've lived here. I don't see it ending anytime soon.
-Jeff
***Anyone that does any single activity for 4-8 hours a day outside of work should be asking themselves, "what the hell am i thinking".***
So no afternoon picnics? No playing baseball for hours? No surfing? No painting the house, cleaning, other chores?
Or do you just reserve your time limit for gaming?
Note I'm not advocating gaming that much, but I'm suggesting you are being woefully self-righteous and judgmental in your pronuncement.
-Jeff
I think you are taking the wrong perspective on this. The question is why don't the companies look into the reasons players skip the content to get to the end-game?
:-)
:-)
I think part of it is the same reason I eat an entire cheescake even knowing it will make me sick.
However, part of it is that levelling is still boring. It's fun for awhile, but at a certain point it gets old.
I'm waiting for the day that you can level up in "battlegrounds" (keeping that vauge) until you reach high-level. All advancement done through constant competition, team or solo. That sounds fun.
-Jeff
Please at least read about the game before you make stupid statements.
1) "No consequences" - Very loosely speaking, Eve is divided into a core area and a frontier. The core area is very heavily policed, and PK'ing results in permanent reputation loss (low enough rep = KOS by the police), and a police response. On the frontier everything goes, but the kill is logged with your character and there is a bounty system.
2) "Eventually one of the stronger players will find you at just the right moment and wipe you out." They only "wipe you out" if you don't tank advantage of cloning and insurance, and if you are flying with all your assets. This does happen to people, but they learn - keep your character clone up to date, insure your ship if you care about it, and don't fly a ship in dangerous areas if you can't afford to lose it.
If you travel the fringes of core space you will actually see a lot of frigates, crusisers, and battlecruisers. It's not all Battleships gate-camping, because those things are expensive and used for important purposes.
Finally, let me point out that the game is heavily waited towards corporate play. There is plenty of room for solo play, but the game between corporations is what makes eve truly wonderful. At that level of play, there are consequences all over the place.
-jeff
P.S. Ok, one more: this is not a game for the person who can't take losing. If you're getting into dangerous territories then you are going to lose ships, you're going to get podded, you'll lose that valuable cargo, and so on. Some people have no problem with that, others complain, but that's a style choice, not an absolute judgement and everyone should remember that.
"SG-1 is probably at its best when the cast & crew isn't taking itself too seriously."
I strongly disagree. While the humor is great, the best episodes were in the first few seasons where everything was deadly serious, the cast was clearly out-classed but not impossibly so, and the supposed "gods" were beaten because guns kill, humans are plucky and smart, and the "gods" were arrogant.
*spoiler below*
I think people forget the really good episodes, like the one where the go'auld put a bomb in a little girl to try to destroy the gate, and the conflict was the internal one of a bunch of people deciding to put the girl in a bomb-test-shelter-whatever so the gate wouldn't be destroyed. Or the antarctica episode, where we Sam had to face up to the fact that she couldn't solve everything. I still get chills when I see Daniel Jackson finally put everything together - they brought out his genius so well in that episode.
-Jeff
Wow has 3 newbie zones per side - it should only have one. The newbies should be focussed into a few zones at first using instances to handle overload. The number of available zones should then branch out as you level.
-Jeff
"I'm a bit taken aback that MicroSoft is doing something to let hobbists flex their creative muscle, especially in such a (relatively) open way."
You know, we need to remember that MicroSoft isn't an evil person. They are a soulless corporation, and there is a difference.
Don't be surprised, try to think of the money making opportunity here.
-Jeff
"We're not talking about what people enjoy. If somebody's still enjoying the game, they probably don't have a problem. It's when they have to play it, when they experience extreme discomfort when they aren't playing, when they turn their backs on everything else in life to play it"
So, some people can play the game for 40 hours a week and no be addicted, while others can?
I'll be honest, I think this "addiction" is hogwash. When I go on vacation, it takes me a day or two to "unwind" from work so I can really relax and enjoy. Does that make me "addicted" to work?
I think you people have simply mapped the brain chemistry associated with a long-term behavioral pattern and labeled it "addiction", which does a disservice to the real addicts who can't physically stop what they are doing without intervention.
-Jeff
So, what outfit did you wear to your raids? When you put on a few pounds, were you bit nervous about certain events because you would have to buy new clothes to make sure those pounds didn't show?
...and so on.
What if you said something stupid, or had some kind of falling out? In WoW, you could always join a new server. A bit harder to do that in real life.
What if you have only 2 hours? If you want to go out, the back and forth will take that much time.
Heck, what if you are tired, and want to socialize but don't want to leave the house? In the old days we used this strange device called a telephone, but it had lots of problems (like connecting to one person at a time).
I think that part of the appeal of these games is that a person can socialize w/o many of the usual issues with socializing in real life. It's also vastly easier to turn on a game then to meet up with people in real life, and vastly easier to organize schedules. In the game, you are jumping continents, but in real life the only organization you need to do is to be in front of the computer at the correct time, for the correct time.
-Jeff
The password is your credit card number. It's the ultimate lever in this situation, so use it.
-Jeff
Unless I'm missing something, virtualization still is not sufficient for running a decent game, due to DX9. So if your big reason for keeping windows is MS Office or Outlook, then virtualization sounds wonderfull to me. But if you're a gamer looking to consolidate to one machine, you still need to dual-boot as far as I can see.
-Jeff
For me a wireless mouse would be usefull when I use my laptop in an easy chair, or in bed, or basically somewhere that's not setup neatly like a desk. The wires get in the way of moving around, and sometimes I have to position the mouse a bit farther away than usual.
It's a minor convience, but if I could find a good bluetooth mouse I would use it (the one I bought had a very jerky motion with major lag between moving my hand and the pointer moving).
-Jeff
I hope you never get double-teamed in basketball. Talk about griefing.
-Jeff
People who drive slower than me are idiots, people who drive faster than me are insane.
Likewise gamers: if you play more than I do, you're a hardcore powergamer no-life. If you play less than I do, you're casual.
-Jeff
What he's measuring is very real, questions of accuracy aside. As a business, my first data point is money. Forum comments, "what everyone says", etc, are pretty meaningless in comparison.
So grats to Sir Bruce for focussing on what makes the world go round.
-Jeff
"When deputies told Smith to knock it off, he came back and is now charged with theft of services."
The police warned him off first. Ignore the whole wireless angle - if someone is stalking my store for 3 months and the police tell him to stop, then he does it again, of course you call the police!
I think 911 is overboard, though, but this guy was warned.
-Jeff
"I somtimes stop playing oblivion becuase its wine is so incessant."
You stop playing oblivion? I didn't realize that was a possibility. What do you do next?
-Jeff
eve has 20k+ at primetime (max of 25k or so lately). It absolutely has more than 100k subscribers.
Note that eve's primetimes are bit different than other games. I often see tons of people sunday afternoon.
-Jeff
"Let me remind you what table-top role-playing used to mean, at least with a good group and GM. It used to mean just that: playing a role, as in a theatre play. The whole point was taking part in an interactive fiction exercise, sorta like being co-autor in a theatre play."
m l for a particularly good example)
No, that's not what table-top used to mean. Table-top role-playing grew out of miniature gaming, with people looking for more details for their miniatures. For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chainmail_(game)
If you look at early RPGs - D&D, Tunnels & Trolls, etc, you'll see they're all about loot and levelling.
As time went on, people started getting more and more into the storytelling aspect, and more rulesets came out that were less tactical, or had details but added on substantial amounts of character details (see http://www.greenknight.com/products/rpg/index.sht
But let's not kid ourselves. These games started as wargames moving towards story-telling, not vice-versa.
-Jeff
I absolutely would fire the people involved for taking what should have been a slam-dunk title and turning it into a travesty. They played around with their ideas too much, and didn't attend to the business of making a solid game.
Note that none of this means the game should be made "my way". With a title like that, they should have made an rpg with mass appeal.
-Jeff
...you see this has nothing to do with WINE. The man used his keyboard to skill-up his weapon skills while he watched a movie on another screen. By his own admission, his character was mostly unattended. This is against the rules.
Note, I'm not judging the person or the rules, just pointing out that what he did was clearly against the rules.
-Jeff
There are many ways to interact in an MMORPG, combat is just one. I had a friend in Asheron's Call who was quite self-sufficient and tended to gather his own cart goods (dye plants, etc), but he also knew tons of people on the server because he spent a good deal of his time trading. He was extroverted in the real sense of the word, even if he didn't group.
Also, just because your pixels happen to be onscreen with other people's pixels doesn't make the activity extroverted. I've been in many groups were I interacted more with my guild then the people around me.
Bottom line is that to judge introverted/extroverted, you need to watch the player, not the character.
-Jeff
I think you need look at the dialogue between frodo and sam and read between the lines a little.
-Jeff
Of course you should find a game that suits your style. But the parent said the tired, old "soloers shouldn't play mmorpgs", which is just silly. There are many forms of interaction, and group combat is only one of them (and not even that interactive, in many cases).
Just to be clear - the DDO devs have every right to make a game that requires grouping, and I have every right not to play, and neither of those are evil. I'll find games, hopefully they'll find players (I mean that, I wish them the best), but our interests won't intersect.
However, if you tell me that all online rpgs must require grouping at all time, then forget it. That's silly.
-Jeff